by Philip Roth
“Su madre? Dónde, señor?”
“Muerto.”
“Hoy?”
“Sí. This morning. Questo auroro. Aurora?” Italian again. Italy again, the Via Veneto, the peaches, the girls!
“Ah, señor, no, no.”
She kindly supported his hairy cheeks with her hands, and when she pulled him to her mountainous bosom, he let her; he’d let her take the pistol out of his pocket, if he had one, and shoot him right between the eyes. She could plead self-defense. Rape. He had a harassment record a mile long already. They’d string him up by his feet outside NOW. Roseanna would see they did it to him the way they’d done it to Mussolini. And cut off his prick, for good measure, like that woman who’d used a kitchen knife twelve inches long to slice the cock off her sleeping husband, an ex-Marine and a violent bastard, for fucking her up the ass down in Virginia. “You wouldn’t do that to me, darling, would you?” “I would,” said R. obligingly, “if you had one.” She and all her progressive friends in the valley couldn’t stop talking about this case. Roseanna didn’t seem anything like so upset by it as she was by circumcision. “Jewish barbarism,” she told him after attending the bris of a friend’s grandson in Boston. “Indefensible. Disgusting. I wanted to walk out.” Yet the woman who’d cut off her husband’s cock seemed, from the excitement with which Roseanna spoke of her, to have become a heroine. “Surely,” Sabbath suggested, “she could have registered her protest another way.” “How? Dial 911? Try it and see where it gets you.” “No, no, not 911. That’s not justice. No, stick something unpleasant up his ass. One of his pipes, say, if he happens to be a smoker. Maybe even one that was lit. If he is not a smoker, then she could shove a frying pan up his ass. A rectum for a rectum. Exodus 21:24. But cutting his dick off—really, Rosie, life isn’t just a series of pranks. We are no longer schoolgirls. Life is not just giggling and passing notes. We are women now. It’s a serious business. Remember how Nora does it in A Doll’s House? She doesn’t cut off Torvald’s dick—she walks out the fucking door. I don’t believe you necessarily have to be a nineteenth-century Norwegian to walk out a door. Doors continue to exist. Even in America they are still more plentiful than knives. Only doors take guts to walk out of. Tell me, have you ever wanted to cut my dick off in the middle of the night as an amusing way of settling scores?” “Yes. Often.” “But why? What did I ever do, or fail to do, to give you an idea like that? I don’t believe I ever once entered your anus without a prescription from the doctor and written permission from you.” “Forget it,” she said. “I don’t know that it’s a good idea for me to forget it now that I know it. You have really had thoughts about taking a knife—” “A scissors.” “A scissors and cutting off my cock.” “I was drunk. I was angry.” “Oh, that was just Chardonnay talking tough back in the bad old days. So what about today? What would you like to cut off now that you’re ‘in sobriety’? What does Bill W. suggest? I offer my hands. They’re no fucking good anyway. I offer my throat. What is the overpowering symbolism of the penis for you people? Keep this up and you’ll make Freud look good. I don’t understand you and your friends. You stage a sit-down strike in the middle of Town Street every time the road crew goes near the limb of a sacred maple tree, you throw your bodies in front of every twig, but when it comes to this unfortunate incident, you’re all gung ho. If the woman had gone outside and sawed down his favorite elm for revenge, this guy might have had a chance with you all. Too bad he wasn’t a tree. One of those irreplaceable redwoods. The Sierra Club would have been out in force. She would have had her head handed to her by Joan Baez. A redwood? You mutilated a redwood? You’re as bad as Spiro Agnew! You’re all so merciful and tender, against the death penalty even for serial killers, judging poetry contests for degenerate cannibals in maximum-security prisons. How could you be so horrified about napalming the Communist enemy in Southeast Asia and so happy about this ex-Marine having his dick cut off right here in the USA? Cut mine off, Roseanna Cavanaugh, and I bet you ten to one, a hundred to one, you’re back on the booze tomorrow. Cutting off a dick isn’t as easy as you think. It isn’t just snip, snip, snip, like you’re darning a sock. It isn’t just chop, chop, chop, like you’re mincing an onion. It isn’t an onion. It’s a human dick. It’s full of blood. Remember Lady Macbeth? They didn’t have AA in Scotland, and so the poor woman went off her rocker. ‘Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?’ ‘Here’s the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.’ She flips out—Lady Powerhouse Macbeth! So what’s going to happen to you? That woman in Virginia is a heroine—as well as a despicable human being. But you don’t have the guts, darling. You’re just a schoolteacher in the sticks. We’re talking about evil, Rosie. The worst you could do in life was become a wino. What the fuck’s a wino? A dime a dozen. Any drunk can become a drunk. But not everybody can cut off a dick. I don’t doubt that this splendid woman has given encouragement to dozens of other splendid women all around the country, but personally I don’t think you’ve got anything like what it takes to get down there and do it. You’d vomit if you had to swallow my come. You told me that long ago. Well, how do you think you’d like to perform surgery on your loving husband without an anesthetic?” “Why not wait and see?” said Roseanna with a smile. “No. No. Let’s not wait. I’m not going to live forever. I’ll be seventy the day after tomorrow. And then you’ll have missed your big chance to prove how courageous you are. Cut it off, Roseanna. Pick a night, any night. Cut it off. I dare you.”
And wasn’t that what he had run from and why he was here? There was a mammoth scissors in the utility closet. There was a much smaller scissors, shaped like a heron, in her sewing kit and an ordinary-size one with orange plastic handles in her middle desk drawer. There was a hedge clipper out in her potting shed. For weeks, ever since this case had begun to obsess her, he had been thinking of throwing them all in the woods up at Battle Mountain when he went at night to visit Drenka’s grave. Then he remembered that her art classes were full of scissors; every kid had a pair, for cutting and pasting. And then the jury in Virginia declares this woman innocent on grounds of temporary insanity. She went crazy for two minutes. Just about how long it took Louis to knock out Schmeling in that second fight. Barely enough time to cut it off and throw it away, but she managed, she did it—shortest insanity in world history. A record. The old one-two, and that’s it. Roseanna and the peaceniks were on the phone all morning. They thought it was a great decision. That was enough warning for him. Great day for women’s liberation but a black day for the Marine Corps and Sabbath. He would never sleep in that house of scissors again.
And who was his comforter now? She was cradling his head as though she intended to give him suck.
“Pobre hombre,” she muttered. “Pobre niño, pobre madre. . . .”
He was weeping, to Rosa’s surprise out of both eyes. She continued nonetheless to soothe his sorrows, talking softly in Spanish and stroking the scalp where the pitch-black hair that strikingly offset the hot green needles that were his eyes used to grow in profusion back when he was a seventeen-year-old in a sailor’s cap and everything in life led to pussy.
“How do you have one eyes?” asked Rosa, gently rocking him to and fro. “Por qué?”
“La guerra,” he moaned.
“It cry, glasseye?”
“I told you, it wasn’t cheap.”
And under the spell of her fleshiness, pressing against her pungency, his nose sinking deeper and deeper into the deep, Sabbath felt as though he were porous, as though the last that was left of the whole concoction that had been a self was running out now drop by drop. He wouldn’t need to knot a rope. He would just drip his way into death until he was dry and gone.
So then, this had been his existence. What conclusion was to be drawn? Any? Who had come to the surface in him was inexorably himself. Nobody else. Take it or leave it.
“Rosa,” he wept. “Rosa. Mama. Drenka. Nikki. Roseanna. Yvonne.
”
“Shhhh, pobrecito, shhhhh.”
“Ladies, if I have put my life to an improper use . . .”
“No comprendo, pobrecito,” she said, and so he shut up, because neither really did he. He was fairly sure that he was half faking the whole collapse. Sabbath’s Indecent Theater.
SABBATH HIT the street with the intention of spending the hours before Linc’s funeral playing Rip Van Winkle. The idea revived him. He looked the part and had been out of it longer even than Rip. RVW merely missed the Revolution—from what Sabbath had been hearing over the years, he had missed the transformation of New York into a place utterly antagonistic to sanity and civil life, a city that by the 1990s had brought to perfection the art of killing the soul. If you had a living soul (and Sabbath no longer made such a claim for himself), it could die here in a thousand different ways at any hour of the day or night. And that was not to speak of unmetaphorical death, of citizens as prey, of everyone from the helpless elderly to the littlest of schoolchildren infected with fear, nothing in the whole city, not even the turbines of Con Ed, as mighty and galvanic as fear. New York was a city completely gone wrong, where nothing but the subway was subterranean anymore. It was the city where you could obtain, sometimes with no trouble at all, sometimes at considerable expense, the worst of everything. In New York the good old days, the old way of life, was thought to have existed no further than three years back, the intensification of corruption and violence and the turnover in crazy behavior being that rapid. A showcase for degradation, overflowing with the overflow of the slums, prisons, and mental hospitals of at least two hemispheres, tyrannized by criminals, maniacs, and bands of kids who’d overturn the world for a pair of sneakers. A city where the few who bothered to consider life seriously knew themselves to be surviving in the teeth of everything inhuman—or all too human: one shuddered to think that all that was abhorrent in the city disclosed the lineaments of mass mankind as it truly longed to be.
Now, Sabbath did not swallow these stories he continually heard characterizing New York as Hell, first, because every great city is Hell; second, because if you weren’t interested in the gaudier abominations of mankind, what were you doing there in the first place?; and third, because the people he heard telling these stories—the wealthy of Madamaska Falls, the tiny professional elite and the elderly who’d retired to their summer homes there—were the last people on earth you’d believe about anything.
Unlike his neighbors (if Sabbath could be said to consider anyone anywhere a neighbor), he did not naturally shrink from the worst in people, beginning with himself. Despite his having been preserved in a northern icebox for the bulk of his life, during recent years he had been thinking that he, for one, could perhaps be something other than repelled by the city’s daily terrors. He might even have left Madamaska Falls (and Rosie) to return to New York long ago if it had not been for his sidekicker. . . . and for the feelings still springing from Nikki’s disappearance. . . and for the silly destiny that had been chosen for him instead by his tiresome superiority and threadbare paranoia.
Though his paranoia, he observed, shouldn’t be exaggerated. It was never the poisoned spearhead of his thinking, never on the truly grand scale, needing absolutely nothing to unleash it. Certainly by now it was no more than a sort of everyman’s paranoia, quarrelsome enough to rise to the bait but by and large frazzled and sick of itself.
Meanwhile he was trembling again, and without the comfort of Rosa’s pungency and its nostalgic meaning. It seemed that once the thing had taken hold, as it had again earlier in Deborah’s ransacked room, he was hard put to extinguish, by an act of will, the desire not to be alive any longer. It was walking along with him, his companion, as he headed toward the subway station. Though he hadn’t walked them for decades, he saw nothing at all of those streets, so busy was he in staying abreast of his wish to die. He marched in unison with it step-by-step, keeping time to an infantry chant he’d had drummed into his head by the black cadre at Fort Dix when he was there training to be a killer of Communists after coming back from sea.
You had a good home but you left—
You’re right!
You had a good home but you left—
You’re right!
Sound off, one-two,
Sound off, three-four,
Sound off, one-two-three-four—
Three-four!
The-desire-not-to-be-alive-any-longer accompanied Sabbath right on down the station stairway and, after Sabbath purchased a token, continued through the turnstile clinging to his back; and when he boarded the train, it sat in his lap, facing him, and began to tick off on Sabbath’s crooked fingers the many ways it could be sated. This little piggy slit his wrists, this little piggy used a dry-cleaning bag, this little piggy took sleeping pills, and this little piggy, born by the ocean, ran all the way out in the waves and drowned.
It took Sabbath and the-desire-not-to-be-alive-any-longer just the length of the ride downtown to together compose an obituary.
MORRIS SABBATH, PUPPETEER, 64, DIES
Morris “Mickey” Sabbath, a puppeteer and sometime theatrical director who made his little mark and then vanished from the Off Off Broadway scene to hide like a hunted criminal in New England, died Tuesday on the sidewalk outside 115 Central Park West. He fell from a window on the eighteenth floor.
The cause of death was suicide, said Rosa Complicata, whom Mr. Sabbath sodomized moments before taking his life. Ms. Complicata is the spokesperson for the family.
According to Ms. Complicata, he had given her two fifty-dollar bills to perform perverse acts before his jumping out the window. “But he no have hard prick,” said the heavyset spokesperson, in tears.
Suspended Sentence
Mr. Sabbath began his career as a street performer in 1953. Observers of the entertainment world identify Sabbath as the “missing link” between the respectable fifties and the rambunctious sixties. A small cult developed around his Indecent Theater, where Mr. Sabbath used fingers in place of puppets to represent his ribald characters. He was prosecuted on charges of obscenity in 1956, and though he was found guilty and fined, his sentence of thirty days was suspended. Had he served the time it might have straightened him out.
Under the auspices of Norman Cowan and Lincoln Gelman (for Gelman obituary see B7, column 3), Mr. Sabbath directed a notably insipid King Lear in 1959. Nikki Kantarakis was praised by our critic for her Cordelia, but Mr. Sabbath’s performance as Lear was labeled “mega-lomaniacal suicide.” Ripe tomatoes had been handed to all ticket holders as they entered the theater, and by the end of the evening Mr. Sabbath seemed to relish his besmirchment.
Pig or Perfectionist?
The RADA-trained Miss Kantarakis, star of the Bowery Basement Players and the director’s wife, mysteriously disappeared from their home in November 1964. Her fate remains unknown, though murder has never been ruled out.
“The pig Flaubert murdered Louise Colet,” said Countess du Plissitas, the aristocrat’s feminist, in a telephone interview today. Countess du Plissitas is best known for fictionalizing biography. She is currently fictionalizing the biography of Miss Kantarakis. “The pig Fitzgerald murdered Zelda,” the countess continued, “the pig Hughes murdered Sylvia Plath, and the pig Sabbath murdered Nikki. It’s all there, all the different ways he murdered her, in Nikki: The Destruction of an Actress by a Pig.”
Members of the original Bowery Basement Players contacted today agreed that Mr. Sabbath was merciless in his direction of his wife. They were all hoping that she would kill him and were disappointed when she disappeared without even having tried.
Mr. Sabbath’s friend and coproducer, Norman Cowan—whose daughter, Deborah, a student in underclothing at Brown, played a starring role in the extravaganza Farewell to a Half Century of Masturbation, elaborately staged by Mr. Sabbath in the hours just before he leaped to his death—tells another story. “Mickey was a genuinely nice person,” Mr. Cowan commented. “Never gave anybody any trouble. A bit of a
loner, but always with a kind word for everyone.”
First Whore Mean
Mr. Sabbath trained in the whorehouses of Central and South America, as well as the Caribbean, before establishing himself as a puppeteer in Manhattan. He never used a rubber and miraculously never contracted VD. Mr. Sabbath often recounted the story of his first whore.
“The one I chose was very interesting,” he once told a person sitting next to him on the subway. “I’ll never forget her as long as I live. You wouldn’t forget your first one anyway. I chose her because she looked like Yvonne de Carlo, the actress, the movie actress. Anyway, here I am shaking like a leaf. This is in Old Havana. I remember how marvelous and romantic that was, decaying streets with balconies. Very first time. Never been laid in my life. So there I was with Yvonne. We both started getting undressed. I remember sitting in a chair by the door. The first thing and the most lasting thing of all is that she had red underwear a red brassiere and underpants. And that was fantastic. The next thing I remember is being on top of hen. And the next thing I remember is that it was all over and she said, ‘Get off of me!’ Slightly mean. ‘Get off!’ Now this doesn’t happen every time, but since it was my first time, I thought it did and got off. ‘You finished? Get off!’ There are some nasty types even among whores. I’ll never forget it. I thought, ‘Okay, what do I care?’ but it did strike me as unfriendly and even mean. How did I know, a kid from the boondocks, that one out of ten would be mean and tough like that, however pretty?”
Did Nothing for Israel